Calderón as a poet. The poetic structure of his plays

The Spanish Baroque dramatist Pedro Caldern de la Barca (1600-1681) was definitely an outstanding playwright when it comes to dramatic craftsmanship, the creation of powerful scenes through an ingenious rhythm of entrances and exits. Nevertheless, he was also a great poet. This often neglected area of research is the main interest of the project Caldern as a poet. The poetic structure of his plays, including a case study of his assonances. This project proposes to investigate this aspect of Caldeornian plays in two different ways. In the first phase, the relations between philosophy, theology and poetics are the main focus of interest. Caldern knew very well the philosophical and theological discourses of his time and his aesthetic concepts are closely related to them. The aesthetic of his works has a close relationship with an order of the world. Calderns characters discuss this relation on several occasions. These meta-literary commentaries and reflections, as well as other formulations of poetological positions, shall be analysed in order to point out the relation between aesthetics, philosophy and theology in Calderns plays. In the second part, I will analyse the assonance, a special Spanish rhyme. This very frequent rhyme type in Calderonian texts has hitherto barely been investigated. The project proposes to carry out research initially with a quantitative analysis establishing an open access online database. Every assonance is to be stored in this database and to be analysed according to specific parameters. This quantitative method shall be completed with a qualitative analysis of five selected plays. In these microanalyses, I will show how Caldern builds his rhyme structures and selects his rhyme words. Which effects can produce assonances? Where and how do they enrich the text with latent meanings? Where and how does the tonality of rhyme underline or anticipate the meaning of the words? This perspective enables new insights into the poetic structure of some of the most outstanding plays in western culture.

The project "Caldern as a Poet" investigates whether and how sound structures can function as a carrier of meaning in Pedro Caldern's (1600-1681) theater. However, neither musical elements nor non-linguistic sounds on stage are the project's main focus. This project deals rather with the question of the sound of language itself. In particular, the rhyme structures of Caldern's most frequent metrical form, the romances, were examined. In order to carry out this analysis, a database of the assonant rhymes (vocal rhymes) of the romances has been created. Using this database it was possible to show that Caldern uses the sound of the rhymes as an important carrier of meaning. Thus, u-based rhymes proved to be audible signals for scenes of psychological and physical violence and o-based rhymes appear as markers of negative and often arrogant characters. These two negatively connotated sound structures contrast with the i-based rhymes. These are acoustic signals for the audience that the text will reveal an important aspect of the characters' love passions. The rhyming sounds on <> and <> appear to be rather neutral. They are simply the two most common letters in Spanish, so their increased appearance in rhyme position would only in exceptional cases stand out from the predominant sound of language. The rhymes of these two sounds deal with very variegated themes and are consequently used in very different scenes, be it moments with dynamic action, long narratives at the beginning or concluding scenes of the play. They can therefore be regarded as a more neutral background, from which the rhyme sounds on <>, <>, and <> stand out particularly. In a second step, these results of the database analysis were contrasted with the discussion about the tasks of speech sound in poetry. In addition, they were linked to the ideas of world harmony, still very present in the Baroque era. These steps provided evidence that Caldern's use of the rhyming sounds corresponds perfectly to the existing opinions at the time about the tasks of speech sound in poetry. These Baroque doctrines about the properties of certain sounds also show a very high similarity to current neurolinguistic results about the connection between speech sound and emotionality. Caldern thus uses emotional associations of the different speech sounds in a very similar way as a modern speaker would do. Random comparisons with other authors of his time finally show that this use of rhymes follows an already existing convention, even if Caldern develops this convention further. Taking into account the harmony discussions of the time, it can be said that Caldern's use of rhymes materializes neoplatonic theories of world harmony.